On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 1:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:

However, in an era where content is making a push to get as close to the
eyeballs as possible, kit getting cheaper and faster because of merchant
silicon, and abundance of aggregated capacity at exchange points, can we
leverage the shorter, faster links to change the model?

Mark.

I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers 

to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for 

caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at 

recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, 

it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with 

no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to.

Imagine you've got a movie; you slice it into 1,000 

encrypted chunks; you make part of your license 

agreement for customers a requirement that they 

will allow you to use up to 20GB of disk space on 

their computer and to serve up data chunks into 

the network in return for a slightly cheaper monthly 

subscription cost to your service.  You put 1 slice 

of that movie on each of 1,000 customers in a 

network; then you replicate that across the next 

thousand customers, and again for the next 

thousand, until you've got enough replicas of 

each shard to handle a particular household 

going offline.  Your library is still safe from 

piracy, no household has more than 1/1000th of a 

movie locally, and they don't have the key to decrypt 

it anyhow; but they've got 1/1000th of 4,0000 different 

movies, and when someone in that ISP wants to watch the 

movie, the chunks are being fetched from other households 

within the eyeball network.  The content provider would have 

shard servers in region, able to serve up any missing shards that 

can't be fetched locally within the ISP--but the idea would be that 

as the number of subscribers within an ISP goes up, instead of the 

ISP seeing a large, single-point-source increase in traffic, what they 

see is an overall increase in east-west traffic among their users.

Because the "serving of shards to others" happens primarily while the 

user is actively streaming content, you have a natural bell curve; during 

peak streaming times, you have more nodes active to serve up shards, 

handling the increased demand; at lower demand times, when fewer 

people are active, and there's fewer home-nodes to serve shards, the 

content network's shard servers can pick up the slack...but that'll generally 

only happen during lower traffic times, when the traffic won't be competing 

and potentially causing pain for the ISP.

Really, it seems like a win-win scenario.

I'm confident we'll see a content network come out with a model like this 

within the next 5 years, at which point the notion of blackmailing content 

networks for additional $$$s will be a moot point, because the content will 

be distributed and embedded within every major eyeball network already,

whether they like it or not, on their customer's devices.

Let's check back in 2026, and see if someone's become fantastically 

successful doing this or not.  ;)

Thanks!

Matt